I WANT IT NOW!: The key to addressing your Customer’s needs on Social Media

17 Apr I WANT IT NOW!: The key to addressing your Customer’s needs on Social Media

This is Veruca Salt, and for those who don’t know she is a character from Roald Dahl’s famous Charlie and the Chocolate factory film adaptation in 1971. She also embodies everything that your customer is in 2018.

Nowadays consumers expect unparalleled levels of service no matter what they are purchasing, and on top of that they want it now! Social Media has become the platform where customers look to express their opinion (whether it be positive or negative) and fight their case. Now as someone who has been in Community Management across a wide range of services, these arguments are normally based upon fiction and they are simply chancing their arm (don’t lie we’ve all done it). With this in mind, there are number of key elements that should be looked at when you address a customer’s needs on social media and allow you to deliver a better service.

Speed of Response

72% of people who complain about a brand expect a response in less than an hour, which puts brands in a position where they must respond in a timely manner. Gone are the days where brands can push customer response rates down their list of KPIs because its been proven it effects the bottom line. Customers are far more likely to recommend your brand to friends or repeat purchase if you provide them with a timely response.

By using speed of response properly, you can use it as a tool actually turn customers into champions of your brand. Great examples of this are Wendy’s (look at their Twitter, it’s hilarious) and KLM who are renowned for their social media response rate and has become a pillar that they base their service on and finally. By investing time and resource into your community management it can be used as a proactive tool to enhance your business rather than how it has traditionally viewed for fire fighting customer issues.

Don’t Ignore Customers on Social Media

This is one of my pet hates, when a brand receives communication from a customer and they ignore it whether it be they don’t have anyone looking after their social media or they choose to ignore it. Social Media is not a channel for a business to just post content and expect users to buy into your brand without making an effort. You want to provide a consumer with a reason to buy into your brand and community management can be used as a tool to do this, after all the main objective of social media is to create conversation and to communicate with each other!

A study from Conversocial showed that users were far less likely to purchase from a brand if they saw that they didn’t respond to users. As you can see, by not responding you could lose almost 50% of potential customers by being inactive, you wouldn’t ignore a customers request in a shop so why would you ignore it online? With the parameters of where people shop now a days its more vital than ever to be as responsive as possible and applying resource to community management is a great start to this.

Have Fun!

People like to engage with something that feels real, so if you reply with a robotic response people tend to not engage. The majority of brands tend to use social media in a very safe tone of voice that does not feel very warm or engaging. This causes them to miss out on the opportunities that you can get from having a bit of fun with your customer by not just giving them a product but more of an experience.

As you can see from above, Oreo managed to have an on-brand conversation without sounding like a robot. Other brands such as Paddy Power have employed comedy writers as community managers in order to bring the brand to life on social media. This adds another string to your marketing bow as people may not have been interested in your product but viral moments such as these can create great brand exposure and awareness from a simple conversation.

There is no ‘community management bible’ that brands can follow in order to execute the perfect game so to speak. Depending on your brand there are different ways to do community management and the suggestions above are just a few of the ways that you can improve the way you help your customers online. If there are any key takeaways from this article it would be to assign resource and personnel to your social media strategy so that it gives a brand the ability to engage with consumers and address there needs. If your brand is looking for social media advice then please feel free to get in touch to see what Pilot Fish Media can do to help.